


(In memory of) A time that never was

by Tabata



Series: Leoverse [165]
Category: Glee
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-20 06:33:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13711920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tabata/pseuds/Tabata
Summary: During one of their visits on Pete's time machine, Blaine and Leo learn about a new mechanism of their tree-universe, and this time is not a nice one.





	(In memory of) A time that never was

**Author's Note:**

> If you have read one or more of the Leoverse stories, you know that they're either what ifs or a AUs of our canon. What you might not know is that they are all part of a bigger multiverse. Pete, who has already been a character of a few stories here and there, is actually a keeper (i.e. sort of timelord) in charge of mantaining the multiverse alive.  
> Reading [The Infernal Device](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9815612) might help you with this one.
> 
> written for: cow-t #8  
> prompt: “Solo uno morirà stanotte” (Sirius Black, Harry Potter) - (Only one will die tonight)

This is not the first time they travel with Pete in his time machine – even tho he insists that it is not exactly that – but it's the first time they saw him so gloomy. He's usually so in control of what is going on, or what is going to happen, that the direst situation doesn't faze him at all as he either knows how to fix it or how it is more likely to fix itself in the end.

But today he's staring at the dashboard with an unusually sad expression and Leo and Blaine have no idea what to make of it. The world they're looking at – one of the many that contain parallel copies of them like in the best sci-fi movies – is almost a carbon copy of the one they live in, the root one from which each of the other sprouted at some point, except that they haven't met each other when Leo was fifteen and they don't know each other, but they're about to.

That is why Pete invited them, to make them witness the moment they lay their eyes on each other for the first time and something changes forever in their lives and, subsequently, in their world and all the others. It's funny because they have certainly lived that moment in real life, but they have never _seen_ it as it was happening to them.

But something clearly went wrong, because the cheerful guy they know became very quiet all of a sudden and, for obvious reasons, they are afraid to ask what's wrong. It wouldn't be the first time that a universe takes a turn for the worse and Pete has to close it, which means condemn it to die, and it's never a nice thing.

It's Blaine who dares to speak first. “Pete, what's wrong?”

“I miscalculated,” he says, and then send the footage their looking at – some sort of live data stream – to the bigger screen, so they can see it better. “You're both in the room, but I thought this was going to happen before or after, not at the same time.”

“This what?” Blaine asks again.

They're looking at the interior of a bank. There are people waiting their turn to talk to the tellers and several employees behind glass dividers, counting money or giving information. Blaine can see himself sitting on a bench, next to a blond man he has never seen before. They're talking quietly, but they seem quite happy. They know each other enough that his other self is giving his friend his wallet to hold while he looks for something in his pocket.

Leo is a few feet away from them, standing in line. He looks about twenty-two – Blaine always gets his age, give or take a couple of years, just looking at him – and he's very caught up in his phone, his hair is pressed down by the biggest headphones he has ever seen. He seems happy.

It's a pretty picture that lasts approximately half a minute, then a group of masked men storms in the bank, screaming and pointing their guns at everybody. Blaine doesn't know why, there are literally hundreds of possible outcomes, but he feels scared. He watches as alter-Blaine gets on the ground as he's been told too. Alter-Leo is doing the same and in that moment, they make eye contact. 

This is the first time those two see each other and it's during a robbery. Leo tenses at his side and Blaine knows he's thinking what he's thinking even before he opens his mouth. “Are we going to die?” He asks.

“Only one will die tonight,” Pete says, his voice heavy.

“One of us?” Leo's panic-stricken voice is higher than usual, and Blaine needs to hold tight on him before he starts pressing random buttons. Whenever something happens to one of his copies or one of Blaine's, he freaks out as if it was his universe-given duty to make sure that every Leo and Blaine in the universe are perfectly fine. Blaine has seen him talk some Leo into giving Blaine a chance, or even hitting one who didn't want to listen to him. That has been a weird thing to watch, really. His husband is particularly fierce whenever their love is involved, and especially if it is at stake.

But Pete is shaking his head. “No, not you two. It's A—“

A gunshot stops him mid-sentence, and the three of them turn to look at the screen. As the robbers leave the building with what they could grab from the cashiers, alter-Blaine's blonde friend is lying on the ground, a blood stain getting bigger and bigger underneath his body. Blaine sees the expression on his own face and his heart just shrinks to the size of a peanut. It's not just sadness or panic or fear, it's one of those pains that's so deep that it rarely lets you claw your way back to normality. That's all he sees – but it's enough – and then Pete turns off the screen.

“Who is he?” Blaine immediately asks, shaken more than he's supposed to be and having no idea why.

“His name is Alan,” Pete explains, sitting down. It's clear that he had no intention of telling this story, but he has no other choice now. “And he's one of your recurrent.”

It took Blaine several years and as many lectures from his husband to understand all the concepts that are connected with this whole thing of the parallel universes, but he eventually learned everything he needed to know. So he knows that a recurrent is a fixed point in the timeline, that is something that always happens in every instance. There are several things that he and Leo usually look for every time they visit a new universe, but Alan has never been one of them. “Is he a new one?”

Pete shakes his head. “No. It's only that I've never let you see him,” Pete says. “He himself is not the recurrence, his death is.”

“What?” Leo asks. Death, more than anything else, has a strong impact on him. As anyone who has never really experience it around himself, he can't deal with it at all.

“No matter the setting, Alan always dies at some point of the timeline. I've tried to save him a few times, but it cannot be done. As a recurrent, its failure to happen should not jeopardize the universe, but Alan's death seem to be somewhat fundamental. Every time I try to fix it, either he dies anyway or something even worse happens to one of you. As far as I understand it, it's some kind of anomaly. It wouldn't surprise me, half of you universe is one.”

“You said you have never showed him to us before,” Blaine says as he tries to grasp the whole situation. “But I've never seen him in my life. And he should be in our world too, right?”

“He was,” Pete says, his tone apologetic. “He died before you could meet him.”

Blaine feels suddenly a hole in his chest that wasn't there before, as if a piece of him had been extracted while he wasn't looking. “Why? If we're supposed to be friend, then—“

“I am sorry, but I don't have an answer for that,” Pete says, honestly. “Everything happens for a reason, but this reason is not always clear to me right from the start. I'm still studying it and I will for a very long time. I might never understand it. But if I do, I'll tell you.“

“That is so sad,” Leo whispers.  
He gets closer to his husband and hugs him, trying to comfort him.

“It always happens like this?” Blaine asks. “In a gunfight?”

“No, the circumstances are always different,” he answers. “But it's usually very sudden, like...”

“Like a correction,” Leo looks up at Pete, who nods. They are both understanding something that Blaine is missing completely. It often happens when they're together. “Alan shouldn't be here, but he is, so the universe fixes the error.”

Blaine thinks that this _error_ is apparently him not having friends and that hole in his chest becomes slightly bigger. “Why do I feel suddenly so heavy?”

“Because now you know about him,” Pete sighs. “That is the reason why I've never let you see him. Aside from the usual fact that you're not supposed to know any of this, let alone the details, you are connected with every single part of the universe. You don't always feel it, but of course the bond becomes stronger the moment you're aware of the thing your bonded with.”

“Will it pass?” Blaine considers himself a very strong person – he has weathered a lot of things after all – but he wasn't ready for this. Maybe because he was so used to think that he wasn't a people person and that he was okay alone, but now he knows that there are several versions of him that had a friend, and that kind of changes his perspective on himself. He feels the pain of having lost something he never had (and never thought he needed), and it's not fair.

“In time, yes,” Pete hesitates. “But you will feel it, I think. Not all the times, but in the right moments it might happens.”

“What? What will I feel?”

Pete sighs. “When he's gone. The echo of it.”

*

It takes Blaine months to find the grave with just a name and a face to go by.

He wasn't even sure Alan was buried in one of the five cemeteries around Westerville. Blaine took his chances, thinking that if they live close to each other in every other universe, then maybe they lived close here too and that they just didn't cross paths at the right time.

Blaine has been thinking about that too. Pete was adamant about not giving him any more details, but he's pretty sure he and Alan missed their chance to meet because he wasn't in school when he was supposed to.  
Leaving Dalton Academy is a plot point in his life, he knows that much, so it's only logical that the alternative to that would have been going on studying and meeting Alan.

Otterbein is a nice quiet cemetery. Most of the tombs are lined up in a green field with some sporadic patches of trees. Alan's gravestone is small but neat; there's a quote of Percy Bysshe Shelley on it. Blaine finds himself wishing that is something Alan would have liked and not something someone else chose randomly for him. He recognizes him from the photo. Alan is smiling in it and he's exactly as Blaine saw him. He died young, he couldn't be more than forty.

The tomb is clean and the flowers are fresh, so there must be someone taking good care of it. For some reasons, this makes Blaine happy. He bought flowers too coming here. He didn't know which ones Alan would have liked more, so he went with white carnations as they mean remembrance and remember him is exactly what he will do from now on.

As he puts them down, someone stops right next to him. “Did you know him?” 

Blaine looks up and finds himself staring in the eyes of a blond, handsome man a little older than Leo. His eyes are cold, but not totally unfriendly. “In another life,” he smiles a little awkwardly.

The stranger nods, apparently unfazed by the odd answer. “He's my boyfriend,” he informs him.

“Then I will leave you alone,” Blaine says right away. He feels suddenly sorry for intruding in something that doesn't regard him at all.

“No, please, stay. I come here every day,” the younger man says to him. Then he nods towards the bouquet in Blaine's hands. “You brought him his favorite flowers.”

That's all they say.  
Silently, they arrange the flowers together.


End file.
